June, 2010

p2pu — 8 Comments
24
Jun 10

The darn drop outs and lurkers

No, I am not speaking of the P2PU management and advisory boards, although some of us have taken rather unconventional academic trajectories including dropping out altogether. But I am writing about a different type of dropping out that is of great concern to P2PU: the number of people that start but don’t complete online courses, including ours.

When we ran our pilot, many in the P2pU community including myself were shocked to see drop out rates above 50% in most courses. We had some courses where only very few people continued to the end. Our surprise was genuine, but maybe naiv (not a bad thing I would argue). It turns out that our completion rates were no worse (or better unfortunately) than those of online education in general.

I quote from Berge and Huang (who reference others)

Historically, the percentage of students who drop out of brick and mortar higher education has held constant at between 40-45% for the past 100 years (Tinto 1982). In the online learning context, dropout rates appear to be higher than for traditional courses. While there are no national statistics for completion rates of distance education students, dropout rates are believed by some to be 10 to 20 percentage points higher than for in-person learning (Carr 2000; Diaz 2002; Frankola 2001).

That means drop out rates between 50-65% are considered to be a reality in online education. Wow! (I haven’t done a comprehensive literature review, but some of the articles that are widely referenced are listed at the end of this post.)

I could try to make the argument that this is a success for P2pU – since our drop out rates are no worse, even though we do not offer any of the usual carrots (degrees) or sticks (fees) that keep people going usually. But unfortunately that would not be good enough. The P2PU learning model is based on a strong sense of community between peers – individuals who help each other to learn. Seeing peers drop out over time is terribly frustrating not only for the course organizer (I know, because I have spent a significant amount of time on instant messenger with course organizers who felt personally responsible and took each drop out very hard) but also for peer learners, who looser their peers.

The second argument I come across frequently when drop out rates come up, is that a high percentage of participants in online courses will only lurk and we shouldn’t worry about that. There is a whole book shelf of academic literature on learning by lurking and the invisible student. I am not arguing that lurkers are not learning anything, but in my personal experience and that of P2PU, it is not the lurkers that benefit most but the doers, the tinkerers and the creators – and that those are the people you will want to take a course with. It’s no fun to be in a room full of invisible students.

That’s why P2PU is aiming for low drop out and lurking rates. Very low ones. It’s always dangerous to nail your colors to the mast, but I would go so far to say that in the perfect P2PU course, less than 10% of participants drop out or don’t participante. (Please note that this is me speaking in my personal capacity – and not necessarily the opinion of the P2PU community!)

I think there are many aspects of online courses that can be improved to reduce drop out rates and increase participation, but two fundamental things that enable us to shift from more than 50% leaving to something much better:

  • Make it difficult (to join) – In our pilot phase (as well as the first round of courses we ran this year), it was too easy to sign-up for a course. As a result many people signed up because the courses “sounded interesting” without really asking themselves if they were ready to make the commitment necessary. By increasing the sign-up hurdle, we can help users think more carefully about joining a course. This hurdle should not be designed to test expertise or intellectual capacity, but motivation. If someone puts in a few hours of work to complete and submit their course sign-up form – they should be allowed to join.
  • Make it personal – The interaction between participants is crucial in creating a social bond that helps people keep going when their busy lives pull them in other directions. One participant in the pilot stated that she knew one of the other participants by name (and assumed the same was true in the other direction). She said she struggled to keep up with the work, but pulled through and completed because she didn’t want her colleague to think she was a quitter. By increasing personal interaction at the beginning of the course, the social ties between participants can be strengthened. Asking participants to upload photos of themselves helps with identification – and as we feel ourselves learning more about others, we assume they learn more about ourselves – and we start caring about their opinions.

Some research on drop out and non completion:

  • Berge, Z & Huang, Y (2004) A Model for Sustainable Student Retention: A Holistic Perspective on the Student Dropout Problem with Special Attention to e-Learning. DEOSNEWS, Volume 13 (5) http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deosnews/deosnews13_5.pdf
  • Carr, S. (2000, February 11). As distance education comes of age, the challenge is keeping the students. Chronicle of Higher Education, A39. (needs subscription)
  • Diaz, D.P. (2002, May/June). Online drop rates revisited. The Technology Source. (online version).
  • Frankola, K. (2001). Why online learners drop out. Workforce, 80, 53-58. (online version).
  • Tinto, V. (1982). Limits of theory and practice in student attrition. Journal of Higher Education, 53 (6): p.687-700.
  • Tyler-Smith, K. (2006). Early Attrition among First Time eLearners: A Review of Factors that Contribute to Drop-out, Withdrawal and Non-completion Rates of Adult Learners undertaking eLearning Programmes. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. (online version).
  • List of articles on the topic at Learning Light.
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22
Jun 10

The AppStore vision of (not so) Open Education

The open web is under threat and it’s a big deal for learning and education (among other things).

Last week a meeting on “Learning, Freedom & the Web” hosted by the Carnegie Foundation brought together a mix of learning experts and web industry geeks to keep the web open for learning. One of the topics that bubbled up naturally was the rising popularity of gated digital communities such as Facebook and closed content delivery mechanisms like the iPad-iTunes-Appstore combination, and their implications for the future of open learning ecosystems.

Mike Hanson from Mozilla Labs sketched out what education could look like if redesigned by Steve Jobs. A vertically integrated content hosting and delivery solution built on Apple Server software and it’s iPhone, iPod and iPad line of consumer devices (of which over 100,000,000 have been sold). Textbooks are stored in the iTextbook store – and organized in appropriate collections for students who automatically download all the content they need to the range of IProducts. If you are an educator or administrator this new world of iEducation sounds pretty slick and compelling. And even if you are an open web activist like  Mike Hanson it is hard to resist – in fact, it was his own brand new iPad on the table that got us started on this  trajectory.

And because curation and integration are so compelling when designed well, we need to carefully think through the implications now. If a personal computing experience built on open standards is the crib, then learning and freedom might be about to go out the window.

As we know already there won’t be any porn in Steve Jobs iEducation ecosystem, but there also won’t be much messiness and tinkering and the kind of practices that characterize constructivist learning processes. There is value in a curated and integrated entertainment experience – I myself have marveled at the ease of purchasing and downloading a digital album directly onto my phone and then syncing it into a music library stored on my computer. However, I am a music consumer – and in meaningful learning systems there are designers, builders, players and doers – but no consumers.

Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation made the connection back to the education system. Half thinking-out-loud, half predicting the trouble to come she suggested that the vertically integrated learning ecology that devices like the iPad enable are perfectly in line with the way the current education system is structured – and will therefore be happily embraced by it.

That’s why we need to understand the long-term implications, push the closed model to at least offer open interfaces and transparency, and put in place open alternatives that offer value in ways that closed approaches can’t.

What could have turned into a pretty gloomy afternoon, was saved by the same innovation process that the open web is so good at: identify the pieces that are in place, see how they can be connected, and start designing and building. We came up with 8 concrete project ideas that are made possible by combining an open source attitude with a deep passion and concern for equitable learning.

I won’t list them all here, but there are a few that are most relevant to P2PU and which we volunteered to play a part in.

  • The P2PU School of Webcraft – our partnership with Mozilla to radically innovate how web developers get trained and find jobs – fits within a broader bucket for linking community assessment, badges (think boy scouts), and employment opportunities. It raises questions about ownership and control of the individual’s education data – the obvious answer coming from the open web community is that it should be the individual who is in charge of her learning data, but the reality today is that lots of different pieces are stuck in different institutions. Thinking beyond web developers, we’d like to find a few other areas where this would work.
  • Does open increase equity? - Mimi Ito reminded us that for open learning to become more than just another opportunity entrenching inequality in education, it needs to increase equity and access. She suggested we needed empirical research to identify areas within the closed certification system that are truly broken and investigate how new open approaches like the one described above could help fix them. I believe web development is one such area, where employers find that existing university degrees or private training certification have little to say about an applicant’s abilities as a web developer – the truly relevant things are not assessed – but Mimi is right that we need more robust research to go from anecdotal evidence to validation of these claims.

Other projects included formal university courses where students engage with Wikipedia content, a look at opportunities around Google Apps (which raises interesting questions about which aspects of an open ecosystem need to be open), and concrete ideas for working with particular programs and partners, for example Road Trip Nation.

The small event at Carnegie was just the beginning of new collaborations between the open web world and learning. Those projects that can demonstrate they are moving forward will meet again to plan the next stage of implementation in September, and hopefully have first prototypes to share with the world in November – where the Mozilla Drumbeat festival in Barcelona offers an opportunity to showcase our work, and reach out to more collaborators.

open education — 1 Comment
1
Jun 10

Paying for infrastructure – Creative Commons Catalyst

Today Creative Commons launches their catalyst campaign – brother to the recently announced catalyst grant programme. I like how they connect the two – funding their work AND raising money at the same time. On one hand, they offer small grants for projects that further their vision, and with the other hand they politely ask for donations to support it. It creates a connection between the donation and the purpose of that donation, even if it’s a very loose connection.

Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses. Anyone may apply for a Catalyst Grant, which ranges from $1,000-$10,000.

But we can’t do it without your help. Our goal is to raise $100,000 from CC supporters like you to fund the grants that will make all this possible. Donate today to help spread our mission of openness and innovation across all cultural and national boundaries.

CC’s work is a very important foundation of a lot of the open content / commons movement – and I don’t think it’s easy to raise the funds necessary to support it. Hal Plotkin asked this question after his keynote at the recent OCWC Global conference. How should and can something that provides an important, but not very glamorous (my words, not Hal’s, with apologies to my lawyer friends at CC) enabling service be supported financially? Funding for infrastructure is difficult to raise. It’s a little bit like raising money for TCP/IP or HTTP. Everyone will agree that it’s important and we all benefit from having it – but we all hope that someone else will pick up the tab. We rely on that friend of a friend who got rich on stock options, sold his company, or house – or simply inherited a lot of money.

Having grown up in a social democracy that offers high-quality infrastructure and services to (almost) all of its citizens, my immediate response is that infrastructure should be paid for by the state from tax income. I personally would welcome a small part of my tax payments to be used to support important infrastructure projects that enable free flow of knowledge and information. Even more so, now that I live in a country where access to knowledge is scarce and expensive. I believe such would be an excellent investment in future development and well-being of all citizens.

The problem with writing blog posts about topics like this is – you end up getting stuck in a dilemma. I have now explained that I think CC’s work is important, that I suspect many people fail to support it, and that the government should consider doing so. However, pending major adjustments in the political landscape of South Africa, that doesn’t really help anyone. So I went ahead and donated a little money to CC today.

Support CC

The benefit of donating is the perceived authority to ramble on a little bit longer, and say a few things about what CC are doing what I think could be improved. In order to do that I think its worth looking at the licences as a service (or even a product) that has to be sold to a particular audience and designing it in order to provide maximum value to that audience. What I mean by that is that there is a tendency for organizations to turn inwards – and in the case of CC that means pay more and more attention to the opinions of legal experts – rather than listen to the customers who don’t understand the legal details, and in most cases don’t give a rat’s hat. Here is what I’d like to see:

  • I would like to see fewer licences and fewer versions – but more certainty that the licence will hold up in court. I believe simplicity beats choice and legal finesse.
  • I would like to see CC separate its core business (the licences) more clearly from other programme areas and especially things that fall broadly into the fostering of “creativity (cultural, educational, scientific and other content) in the commons”. This separation should include budgets – so that donors can choose what activities their money ends up supporting. Don’t get me wrong, I think creativity should be supported, and probably in a fairly vague and flexible way, but I think part of the funding challenge for CC is that people, especially those who are making small donations, are comfortable funding the licences but might not be as comfortable with CC using their donation to foster “creativity”. That applies to me for example.